The present invention relates to an intermittent drive assembly, and more particularly to an intermittent drive assembly for driving a transfer carriage in a garment assembly device.
The steps of producing a portion of garment, such as a garment pocket, involve a series of separate operations which have traditionally been done by hand since automatic handling of fabric is extremely difficult because of the pliability of the fabric. This makes garment fabrication a labor intensive product and thus quite expensive.
Recently attempts have been made to manufacture separate garment fabrication component assemblies which can be combined together in an overall garment fabrication assembly. A necessary and integral part of such an overall assembly is means for transferring the fabric workpieces from one assembly stage to the next automatically. Because the machine components must all work in a timed interrelationship this requires relatively high accelerations in the transfer mechanism in moving from one station to the next. To undertake this using an electric motor which is suddenly accelerated and decelerated is not feasible because of the large inertia and the high inductive currents which are thereby produced. A second problem is the mechanical stress on the gear indexing mechanisms which must rapidly accelerate and decelerate with a consequent wear and tear due to such drastic changes in momentum. This is true even where the transfer mechanisms are pneumatically operated. It is thus desirable to have a transfer mechanism which produces little wear and tear on the carriage and the carriage support and which may be driven by a constant speed motor to produce a reciprocating linear motion.